Category: R

Holger von Jouanne-Diedrich hits the casino:

The longest streak in roulette purportedly happened in 1943 in the US when the colour red won 32 consecutive times in a row! A quick calculation shows that the probability of this happening seems to be beyond crazy:

0.5^32[1] 2.328306e-10

So, what is going on here? For once streaks and clustering happen quite naturally in random sequences: if you got something like “red, black, red, black, red, black” and so on I would worry if there was any randomness involved at all (read more about this here: Learning Statistics: Randomness is a strange beast). The point is that any sequence that is defined beforehand is as probable as any other (see also my post last week: The Solution to my Viral Coin Tossing Poll). Yet streaks catch our eye, they stick out.

There’s one critical assumption in this post, which is that the game is fair, in that each event has an equal probability of happening. But as a Bayesian, if a roulette table hits red 32 times in a row, it certainly opens the door to the idea that maybe the odds on that table with that dealer aren’t quite equal between red and black.

Joseph Ricker gives us a gentle introduction to a not-so-gentle topic:

This plot might depict 80 measurements for a participant in a clinical trial where each data point represents the change in the level of some protein level. Or it could represent any series of longitudinal data where the measurements are take at irregular intervals. The curve looks like a time series with obvious correlations among the points, but there are not enough measurements to model the data with the usual time series methods. In a scenario like this, you might find Functional Data Analysis (FDA) to be a viable alternative to the usual multi-level, mixed model approach.

This post is meant to be a “gentle” introduction to doing FDA with R for someone who is totally new to the subject. I’ll show some “first steps” code, but most of the post will be about providing background and motivation for looking into FDA. I will also point out some of the available resources that a newcommer to FDA should find helpful.

Read on to learn more.

Holger von Jouanne-Diedrich explains the results of a poll:

Some time ago I conducted a poll on LinkedIn that quickly went viral. I asked which of three different coin tossing sequences were more likely and I received exactly 1,592 votes! Nearly 48,000 people viewed it and more than 80 comments are under the post (you need a LinkedIn account to fully see it here: LinkedIn Coin Tossing Poll).

In this post I will give the solution with some background explanation, so read on!

Read on to understand why it’s just as likely that you’ll see a sequence, when flipping a coin, of H,H,H,H,H,H just as often as you’ll see H,T,H,T,H,T.